Carpentersville newspaper controversy was a big misunderstanding

June 21, 2011|Mary Schmich

After the village of Carpentersville passed a resolution making English the town's official language, Chris Krug, who thought the law was silly and mostly for show, figured he'd never hear about it again.

"Never in a million years," he said Tuesday.

For the next four years, he didn't hear about it again. Who did? The English-only noise that the little Fox River town had stirred up in 2007 — rowdy meetings, big protests, national news stories on the immigration fight in middle America — seemed to vanish.

But last week, Krug, who is executive editor of the daily suburban Northwest Herald, opened an email from an assistant to the town's village manager. It read, in part:

"In accordance with Resolution R07-84 which declares English as the official language of the Village of Carpentersville, the Village would like to immediately cease delivery of your publication, El Conquistador, and any other information or publication that is not written in English."

Krug's first thought, as he quipped in a column a few days later: "Hmmm ¿por qué?"

He was genuinely surprised. Though he lives a few miles away in Cary, he spent a recent summer playing softball in Carpentersville. He calls it "a great town."

It's a great town that's half Latino. That population keeps growing.

As Krug noted in his column, "the newspaper that the village has asked to go away actually promotes the general idea that Carpentersvillians demanded through resolution."

El Conquistador is a free weekly that derives its name from the idea of conquering the divide between English and Spanish. It runs its articles, most of them drawn from the Northwest Herald, in both languages. The week it was evicted from the Village Hall, it highlighted a piece on a Waukegan sports park and another on the pleasures of an Illinois summer.

"This isn't radical left-wing pulp," Krug said.

Oh well. He notified his circulation department to stop dropping papers at the town hall. Then he wrote a lighthearted but biting column item.

Soon the story was being tweeted, posted, quoted, and Mark Rooney was trying to explain.

"It's a misunderstanding," he said when I called Tuesday.

Rooney, the village manager only since September, said this is what happened:

He was walking down the hallway last week. Irked by papers strewn on the floor, he asked, "What is this clutter?" He didn't notice what language the papers were in. He didn't have a thought about Resolution R07-84.

"The English-only thing is a historical artifact," he said, noting that all the town's public service announcements are in English and Spanish. "It's not something I've seen discussed in my nine months of working here."

He had, of course, heard about the resolution before he came to town after a stint as manager in nearby Wheeling.

"It gave me some pause when I applied for the job," he said. "I was assured it was an issue that wasn't coming back."

So when he instructed his assistant to get rid of the papers, he said, he was just trying to clean up. He didn't expect her to invoke the English-only rule in her email to Krug.

"There's no need to create ill will in 50 percent of your community over a free magazine," he said.

But his secretary did what she thought she was supposed to do. He wishes she hadn't. So does she.

"It was totally innocent on her part," he said. "She's crestfallen."

I have to say I believed him. Sometimes things get lost in translation, even when everyone speaks the same language.